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Thursday, May 2, 2019

Here's How You Can Unf*ck Waze

If you’re a regular Waze user, you’ll notice that the app’s been fucked up this past week. After the latest update, it’s been defaulting to a route that takes twice or even thrice as long.
After watching Avengers: Endgame last week, I tried it out myself and yup, even at close to 11:30 PM, it said it’ll take me 2 and a half hours from Shangri-La Mall to Marikina. A quick tap at the “routes” though revealed that it shouldn’t take more than 40 minutes. This morning, I tried it again. Marikina to Megamall would take 2 hours and 24 minutes. WTF. A tap of the alternative routes said it should take no more than 54 minutes. What gives?

Apparently, it has to do with Waze’s latest update which integrates “restricted areas / routes” into the map. With this update, Waze is supposed to help you avoid areas with number coding and so forth. Unfortunately, by default you can’t opt out of it.

You can tap Settings > Driving Preferences > Vehicle details and enter your license plate if you wish to tell Waze which day your car’s coded. However, some users report that even when they inputted their plate number details, the app would still route them, by default, through a longer route. And even if it works, it’s limiting because most people have two cars in the garage or some people don’t give a shit about coding and they’ll just whip out some police or media connection to escape it.

Until Waze is able to clean up their app during the next update, some Wazers have found a work around. Instead of setting your Vehicle type to “Private”, they suggest switching it to “Taxi” instead. This will route you through the best route in terms of time.